Wednesday, November 14, 2012

A LOT OF US THOUGHT BIRTHERISM WAS A FAD, TOO

When I read the latest Roy Edroso dispatch from Wingnuttia, I realize that secession talk on the right might be more than one-week phenomenon -- I could easily imagine it being the central organizing idea of the loony right for the next four years, the way president Obama's alleged socialist/Muslim foreignness was for the last four:

... [Jeff] Goldstein approves the movement to secede from the former United States via online petitions -- "few believe anything will come of it, though I signed all that I could find" -- and claims counter-petitioners who called the neo-Confederates "mentally deficient" and advocated "more education in our state to eradicate their disease" were not just making harmless jokes at the expense of same, but "wish to control us, take our liberties, and force us into a kind of 'progressive,' happy-faced indentured servitude... [they] offer as a solution to the disease of American exceptionalism more leftwing propaganda driven through a union-controlled, heavily leftwing education system."

William Teach of Right Wing News also thinks making fun of him and his buddies is fascist: "Progressives (read 'fascists') hate when people other than themselves are accorded First Amendment Rights."

"Given the great divide in the country, I would love to leave the liberals to their leeching ways without a host," fantasizes Freedom Eden. And don't think she hasn't thought it through: "I'd like Wisconsin to secede, but how could we leave Milwaukee and Madison behind? Milwaukee would be easy enough to drop because it's located on the state's eastern border. Madison would be more messy. Maybe we could get the Madison libs to move to Milwaukee..." See, they've learned a few things since Fort Sumter. No more waiting for war to carve out new states -- just quarantine the moochers of the major cities, and you'll have sustainable mini-Valhallas -- just like East Germany and West Berlin! ...

Remember that whether it was true or not, the ten-second explanation of how Obama won in '08 was that young, mostly white hipsters were his most passionate foot soldiers and voters. This year the ten-second version is that those damn brown people showed up at the polls -- oh, and, demographically, they're taking over America, and planning to marry your sister. (OK, I just threw in that last part.) For the right, the first Obama election was about the horror of a non-white commie-lib worming his way into the Oval Office; this election is about non-white commie-libs taking over America. As a result, there's secession talk! Who'd have imagined?

Hispanics, blacks, gays, non-purity-ring-wearing single women -- it's the scariness of the electorate, I think, that's generating the secession talk. It's OK for the former flag-wavers to be disloyal to America by signing these petitions because America doesn't exist anymore, at least not the real America.

So I think we'll hear secession talk at least up to the midterms -- and if the Democratic Party actually figures out how to turn out this diverse base in 2014, the secession shrieks are only going to get louder.

The idea, like voting, is to sign a petition for the state in which you actually reside. Moron.

My son and I have discussed this quite a bit, and though we both find the whole hating Obama aspect a tad distasteful, we are both Cascadians, dedicating to seeing the Free and Independent Republic on the North Pacific Coast that Thomas Jefferson envisioned.

The ends justify the means.

Yo! Texas, get the fuck out. Take Oklahoma with you. Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana too.

He also labors under the delusion that the rich rightfully own what they have in hand and the government has no moral right to take it in taxes for redistributive purposes.

Perfectly clear and routine libertarian and Randian ideology.

How often do liberals challenge those ideas head on?

Even in the form of the rather shocking bumper sticker that was common during 2008, "Socialism is fine until you run out of other people's money."

A quote, I think, from Maggie Thatcher.

And yet socialism and all but the most Spartan, safety-net liberalism regard it as false that what the rich have in their hands is rightfully theirs, their fair share, theirs "fair and square."

And they also regard it as false that the state or the people have no moral right to take money from who has it to expend for essentially redistributive purposes.

How about a bumper sticker quoting Aquinas?

It is I, an atheist, who suggest this.

"Everything the rich man has beyond what he needs belongs by right to the poor."

Quote that at a Christian right confab of mucky-mucks and watch the Catholic bishops, to this day committed to their church's "preferential option for the poor," squirm under the eyes of the truly Randian Protestant pastors.

Yes, moral talk is a fraud, just like God talk.

But if they're going to use it against us how can we avoid using it against them in our own defense?